


Love and Bombs

by Spark_Writer



Series: Human Error [3]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Feelings, M/M, POV Sherlock Holmes, Pining Sherlock, Post-His Last Vow, Unfinished Business, i cried, prepare yourself, this is just angst, what he wishes he'd said to john
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-03
Updated: 2014-07-03
Packaged: 2018-02-07 08:01:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,696
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1891374
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Spark_Writer/pseuds/Spark_Writer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Love and bombs aren’t all that different, John. In the end, they’re almost indistinguishable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Love and Bombs

**Author's Note:**

> The italicised bits are excerpts from the poem, "Litany in Which Certain Things are Crossed Out" by Richard Silken. This may be the most painful thing I've ever written.

_Every morning the maple leaves. Every morning another chapter where the hero shifts from one foot to the other. Every morning the same big and little words all spelling out desire, all spelling out_

                                             

_You will be alone always and then you will die._

**_._ **

John, you should know—

John, I am in—

John, I ought to tel—

John, how do I—

John, you are—

John, it’s time one of us was—

John, I can’t thi—

John, I keep imagining what you look like whe—

John, what are you doing to m—

John, this is—

John, I’m—

John, we are—

John, I am unbearably—

John, I’m afrai—

John, I cannot—

John, you make me want t—

John, you’re so inconven—

John, it’s always y—

John, I am ashamed t—

John, I think I—

John, there’s something I’ve meant to s—

John,

**.**

_So maybe I wanted to give you something more than a catalog of non-definitive acts, something other than the desperation._

**.**

You’ll never know what I’m thinking. You never learned to observe as well as I, so I think I’m safe in saying these words, as they will never make it out of my head. I need you. I needed you before I ever knew you. I needed you when I was just getting into the business of needles and nights spent staring unseeingly at walls, and I needed you when my only titles were freakand alone, and I needed you when a boy wrote _faggot_ on my school desk in felt tips, and I needed you when I walked in on uncle Frederic touching my cousin, and I needed you when I found my first body (femur exposed, torn ligaments, congealed blood, ravens picking at the eyeballs), and I needed you when Mycroft said it wasn’t practical to be a pirate, and I needed you that day when Redbeard was put to sleep, and I needed you when I smashed a frog on the pavement to see when it would get up and sat and sat until I realised it wouldn’t and was sick for the rest of the day. I needed you, always. I just didn’t know until now.

The subconscious plays tricks on the mind. Makes us blind to certain inevitabilities.

I spent a long time under that spell. Revelation: It’s over now.

But you don’t know the fog has lifted. And if you did, you’d say it was too late. You’re right. It is. Doesn’t help the fact that the sight is lined, the little red dot standing perfectly still over my chest.

Love and bombs aren’t all that different, John. In the end, they’re almost indistinguishable.

**.**

_Love always wakes the dragon and suddenly, flames everywhere. I can tell already you think I’m the dragon, that would be so like me, but I’m not. I’m not the dragon._

**_._ **

The thing is, I’ve spent three and half decades building my armour. To the unpracticed eye, I am heartless; without emotion, remorse, or empathy.

This was acceptable (alone is what I have, alone protects me) but then you came along with your dreadful striped jumpers and seedless jam and dogged loyalty to entirely the wrong person, and saw right through me. The illusion fell to disrepair. I tried to resurrect it more times than one, but I needn’t have bothered. You are an X-ray, John. Proof of my humanity.

**.**

_I sink the boat of love, but that comes later. And yes, I swallow glass, but that comes later. And the part where I push you flush against the wall and every part of your body rubs against the bricks, shut up. I’m getting to it._

**.**

Just once would have been enough.

Heated? No.

Fierce? Plebian.

Fervent? Ugh.

Erotic? Pedestrian.

 

Only a fool would imagine it some ferocious, sensual event. There wouldn’t be hips pressed together, or hungry mouths, or, God forbid, tongue. Bumping noses and trembling knees would be more accurate. An open-eyed, unsophisticated, timid affair. A testament to the desperately unspoken. There would not be great arousal, John, but there would be great awe.

 

Ashes to ashes. Dust to dust.

I’ve always loathed unfinished business.

**.**

_You see, I take the parts that I remember and stitch them back together to make a creature that will do what I say or love me back. I’m not really sure why I do it, but in this version you are not feeding yourself to a bad man against a black sky prickled with small lights._

**_._ **

“Sherlock is actually a girl’s name,” I said, and you suffered that beautifully, but what I meant is, “I want you. I want you. I want you.”

I want to wake up and have you lying there next to me, the smell of you, your shampoo and film of night sweat, the taste of your mouth before you’ve brushed your teeth, your lips on my jugular, my hand on your waist, hair disheveled, the weight of you holding me to Earth, our bodies surging and shifting, a synchronization of desire, the colour of your eyes: impossible, the feel of your tongue dipping lazily between my ribs, I: breathless and beguiled, your fingers clenching my hips, leaving bruises, our exhalation of atoms mingling together.

I want permission to touch you, at crime scenes, over dinner, at home, on the tube, walking, hiding from killers, at the park, in a cab, anywhere. Grab your hand—assure you there’s no murderer nearby, I just wanted to hold it—watch the tension fade from your body, grip your fingers tightly, count the bones. Rest palm against the base of your skull, feel the plates beneath; calciferous, unyielding. Tangle fingers in your hair. Stroke the slope of your shoulder, forearm, wrist, return to shoulder, then neck, God, I’ve always had a fascination with your _neck_ ,  lick the skin beneath your earlobe, dulcet bundle of nerves, startled intake of breath from you and dilated pupils to match, a lovely display, tilt my head so our lips can slot together with—I call it efficiency, you call it Oh Jesus Christ Fuck Me—feel the beat of your heart, admire the way it keeps time, speeds up, broadcasts its affection, attraction, adoration.

I want to flay the skin from your bones and crawl inside you just so I can find out what makes you tick, learn your secrets, revel in your human inconsistencies, scrape my name into your organs: _Sherlock_ on your liver, _Sherlock_ on your stomach, _Sherlock_ on your heart. I want intimacy but not the trite drivel most people crave, no, I want you to put your hand on my throat and crush it until there is no oxygen going in, only out, until you have to kiss me just to make certain I don’t swoon, my lungs full of your breath, an afflux of glitter swimming in my eyes, a roar building in the space around us.

I want to know of the day of your birth, your first memory, the first time you ever thought you’d die from joy, die from grief, die from the simple fact of existing.

I want to outrun death with you, and when it catches up to us, I want to be the first to go, because I know I lack the strength to carry on alone, that I have fallen into devotion from which I will never recover, that the last thing I ever see _must_ be you.

The truly inconvenient part of all this is that I want the same from you, John. Mirrored longing.

At Heathrow, you held my hand like you were hanging off the edge of a precipice. You looked at my lips. But you have Mary now, and a baby. I am going to die soon.

This is not the outcome I would have chosen, but it’s what’s best for you. You’ll be safe. Alive. You deserve both. I also know that predictable domesticity with a wife and child and picket fence will be the thing that kills you. But I can’t do anything about that, now, can I? At least she’s an assassin, John. You chose well.

 

And don’t scoff. We both know you have a type.

**.**

_The entire history of human desire takes about seventy minutes to tell. Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of time._

**.**

I don’t believe in parallel universes, John, but there is some appeal in imagining a place in which you and I fall together. I think of it often.

**.**

_Forget the dragon, leave the gun on the table, this has nothing to do with happiness. Let’s jump ahead to the moment of epiphany, in gold light, as the camera pans to where the action, lakeside and backlit, and it all falls into frame, close enough to see the blue rings of my eyes as I say something ugly._

**.**

You’ll go to your grave never knowing how I felt about you.

Bullets, blades. None of it is comparable to this kind of pain.

Words unspoken.

**.**

_Here is the repeated image of the lover destroyed. Crossed out. Clumsy hands in a dark room. Crossed out. There is something underneath the floorboards. Crossed out. And here is the tabernacle reconstructed. Here is the part where everyone was happy all the time and we were all forgiven, even though we didn’t deserve it._

**_._ **

You forgive the worst of people, don’t you, John? Always, always. And I don’t mean Mary. Or whatever her name is.

I mean the high-functioning sociopathic bastard with whom you resided for two years and grieved over for another three. The man at whose grave you stood and spoke, whose belongings you shrouded in soft cloth and veneration, whose memory flared at your core like a dozen candles. The man sitting on an airplane thinking only of you, thinking that heroes _do_ exist, and that you _are_ one of them, and that caring, for all the magnificent discomfort it creates, _is_ an advantage, and that you will always be the best and bravest human being he’s ever known.

“Yes, of course. Of course I forgive you,” you said, once. Train carriage. Bomb. Eighty-nine seconds to live.

 

You were so wrong, John. You were so wrong. I love you.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Comments and kudos are the best gifts in the universe. <3


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